Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. By Tom De Luca and John Buell. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 228p. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

This is a book that looks toward achieving a democracy without demons—a more inclusive, respectful, egalitarian, participatory, and just political covenant—by examining the current proliferation of demonizing rhetoric in the United States as indicative of a dangerous and divisive moral paradox. America's moral paradox, according to Tom De Luca and John Buell, is a deeply rooted dilemma of two fundamentalisms—social “Puritanism” versus material “hedonism”—that must be negotiated with care if we are to avoid projecting hidden fears and forbidden desires onto “despised others” (pp. 48–49). Each pole of the paradox exists in every American, but when one pole begins to dominate, the desire to displace anxiety onto others begins to swell.